Rumble
Kathryn Jones
May 31, 2022
I hear a rumble in the distance
A thunderstorm is on the way
Black clouds mass on the horizon
Another army led astray
I hear a rumble in the distance
War and murder stalk the Earth
Children’s blood spilled in the hallways
They were doomed right from their birth
I hear a rumble in the distance
It’s coming closer every day
No gun is large enough to stop it
No feet fast enough to run away
I hear a rumble in the distance
A million marching toward the door
Of the chambers of the chosen
Who favor the rich over the poor
I hear a rumble in the distance
It’s growing louder all the time
The reckoning is fast approaching
The bell will toll, the clock will chime
I hear a rumble in the distance
It will soon be at the feet
Of those who perpetrate injustice
The time has come for their defeat
I hear a rumble in the distance
It’s the sound of wind and rain
Washing clean the battered landscape
And the bloody human stain
Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.
